This study is part of a time-series collection of national
surveys fielded continuously since 1952. The election studies are
designed to present data on Americans' social backgrounds, enduring
political predispositions, social and political values, perceptions
and evaluations of groups and candidates, opinions on questions of
public policy, and participation in political life. Substantive themes
of the 1998 election study include, among others, knowledge and
evaluation of the House candidat... (more info)

This study is part of a time-series collection of national
surveys fielded continuously since 1952. The election studies are
designed to present data on Americans' social backgrounds, enduring
political predispositions, social and political values, perceptions
and evaluations of groups and candidates, opinions on questions of
public policy, and participation in political life. Substantive themes
of the 1998 election study include, among others, knowledge and
evaluation of the House candidates and placement of the candidates on
various issue dimensions, interest in the political campaigns,
attentiveness to the media's coverage of the campaign, media use,
evaluation of the mass media, vote choice, partisanship, and
evaluations of the political parties and the party system. Additional
items focused on political participation, political mobilization,
evaluations of the president and Congress, the "Lewinsky affair,"
egalitarianism, moral traditionalism, political trust, political
efficacy, ideology, cultural pluralism, and political
knowledge. Respondents were also asked about their attitudes toward a
wide range of issues, including social policy, race policy, military
and foreign policy, immigration, foreign imports, prayer in schools,
school vouchers, the environment, the death penalty, women's rights,
abortion, and religion and politics, including new measures of
explicitly political and religious orientations. Demographic items
such as age, sex, nationality, marital status, employment status,
occupation, and education were also included.

Universe:
All United States citizens of voting age on or before
November 3, 1998, residing in housing units other than on military
reservations in the 48 coterminous states.

Data Types:
survey data

Data Collection Notes:

Users are advised that this version of the 1998
data will not run on NESstat, the front-end application distributed on
the 1948-1997 ANES CD-ROM. For a version that will run on NESstat,
users should download a copy from
http://www.umich.edu/~nes.

The
codebook is in ASCII text format, and the data collection instrument
is provided as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file.

Methodology

Sample:
National multistage area probability sample.

Mode of Data Collection:
face-to-face interview,
telephone interview

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Created online analysis version with question text.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release:1999-03-25

Version History:

2000-11-10 An errata file describing minor changes to the data
and documentation has been added to the collection. Also, minor
formatting changes have been made to the SAS and SPSS data definition
statements.